Matt Campbell's Blog

One thing I think is cool about Apple's iBooks //via @tuaw

Tuaw's Chris Rawson wrote yesterday:

The announcement this morning that textbooks would be sold through the iBookstore wasn't especially surprising. But the price was; full-featured multimedia electronic textbooks being offered for no more than US$15 is exactly the kind of disruptive shakeup the industry needed.

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[W]hy the lower prices? AllThingsD asked that question of McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw, and it turns out to have a simple answer. Schools will usually hold onto the paper versions of textbooks for about five years, meaning the publishers are only recouping about $15 per year anyway. Via the iBookstore, textbooks can be sold directly to students (who may or may not be offered payment vouchers from their schools), and from the publishers' perspective, the beauty of this arrangement is that those books can't be re-used or re-sold.

Full Article

That price drop is a big deal to me and my wife. This past summer, we decided to home school our eldest son*. Being the uber-geek that I am, I have been keeping a sharp eye out for how to leverage technology in order to give my son a great eduction. Apple's announcement is pretty huge for my wife and I as it hopefully means that we will be able to purchase quality textbooks for our son at prices that are easy on our budget.

The fact that all of this is happening on the iPad excites me as well. My wife and I are on the front end of being Digital Natives**. We grew up with computers and gained easy access to the internet in high school and college. However, the contrast we see between us and our kids, who learned to use iOS at 18 months and don't understand how limiting live TV is, is huge. They interface with the world is such a different way that we need to change the way we do education. I'm excited to see how Apple pushes forward innovation in that space.

 

* The reasons for our decision to home school are outside the scope of this post, but feel free to ask me about it if you are interested. Briefly, I can tell you it was a long, thorough and careful process where we considered not just our son's education, but his social development and our family circumstances as well. I know some people who were home schooled as kids and turned out strange. I know some who turned out just fine. We aren't crazed zealots about it, and we strongly believe it isn't for everyone. If you are considering it, I encourage you to read up on both sides of the argument and to talk to people who have gone through that process.

** If you want to read more about Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, in addition to Marc Prensky's original paper, I recommend googling for Seth Godin's thoughts on education, art and the Post-Industrial Revolution.

Fixing BUNDLE_WITHOUT on Heroku Cedar

While I was working on the lacunavinea.org web site (it's not linked as it isn't live yet), I ran into an issue with bundler on Heroku. Heroku Cedar has BUNDLE_WITHOUT hard-coded to exclude only development and test.

This is rather limiting if you want to have other groups in your Gemfile that don't get inlucded in the running app. Cucumber users will especially notice this, as the cucumber folks suggest you put the cucumber gems in the own group. I also like to put gems like heroku and ZenTest in their own group.

I went looking to see if anyone else had found a solution, and I came across this tweet by @grosser.

BUNDLE_WITHOUT on heroku cedar -> Gemfile: cucumber = (ENV['HOME'].gsub('/','') == 'app' ? 'test' : 'cucumber'); group cucumber do ... end

— Michael Grosser (@grosser) December 15, 2011

I thought I would give a more expanded example here, as it look me a moment to realize what he meant. Here's an example Gemfile that creates some groups. I also wrote a little helper function to make it a bit nicer looking.

Works like a charm! Thanks @grosser!

New Gaming Addiction

Last week, my brother-in-law introduced me to Ticket to Ride by Days of Wonder. It is a regular board game played with little plastic trains, a deck of cards and a board. You can read about how to play elsewhere. The short on this one is that I was hooked instantly.

I love turn-based startegy games as they allow time to properly think, and Ticket to Ride fit the bill nicely. I also found out that you can get it for iPad (the iPhone version is a seperate download), which is great for online play (or local wifi/bluetooth), playing by yourself, and playing without having to set up the board or manually track your score. The game also supports the "pass and play" or hotseat model for multiple players, but that is ackward as you have a hand of cards that your opponents aren't supposed to see. My wife and I have been playing on local wifi with two iPads, and that has been great.

The iOS versions are also a lot cheaper (especially if you are interested in the expansions available via in-app purchase) than buying the actual printed board game, but you do give something up playing on the screen instead of at a table. If you want to play, I'm soup.matt on Game Center.

And while we are on turn-based strategy games, another one I have been enjoying on the iPad is Neuroshima Hex. This one is a more complex military strategy game that is pretty easy to learn, but has very deep strategy that can take a long time to master. It is a universal app, so one purchase runs on your iPhone/iPod Touch as well as your iPad. It lacks online support (a bummer if your gaming buddies aren't local), but the game is well suited to "pass and play" (no hiding cards to worry about).

The main advantage of the iPad version over the printed game is that battles can take a long time to run and require a lot of bookkeeping, something a computer is much better at than a human, which means you get to focus on the startegy and game play instead of filling sheet of notebook paper with calculations. Neuroshima Hex also has a lite version if you want to try before you buy.